Egress Solutions Product & Innovation Management Blog

Private Equity is shifting. Firms have a record number of competitors. Asset prices are steep. Dry powder is abundant, and expectations are high. Firms can no longer depend on deleveraging and achieving operational cost synergies.

Would it be easier to sell your software product if you could read your buyer's mind and know the most important factors they care about? Would it be easier to position your product against a competitor if you knew what drives customers to buy their product over yours?

In most technology companies, "go-to-market" is a throw away phrase; everyone from sales to finance uses it when it’s convenient. It is a catch-all phrase and often used as a placeholder for things related to target customers, product direction, marketing strategy, sales enablement, pricing and launch efforts.

The problem is that we put lots of things in the go-to-market bucket often with good intentions –

“We will address these once the UX and feature priorities settle down.”

Product management organizations can have a profound effect on a company’s success – or failure – and every C-level executive should thoughtfully and intentionally utilize product management as a key member of the C-team.

OK – maybe this is extreme (or maybe not), but one thing is clear;
when you are missing revenue targets, when your conversion rates are low, or your product adoption is weak, then your Go To Market strategy is failing. The finger pointing means you are not sure what part of your GTM strategy needs work.

If you are going to make the effort and spend the resources to engage customers after a buying decision occurs, wouldn’t it make sense to determine how that buyer rationalized that outcome?

Buyers’ Insight determines just that. Its focus is to measure the things that matter most from the buyers’ perspective. Measuring these outcomes over time will allow you to stop relying on anecdotal information or a single source of “truth” (like SalesForce or sales reps).

When I talk to our clients about how they execute on their Go-to-Market strategy, I usually get a blank look. Other times the reaction is emotional, and I won’t repeat some of the words I have heard to describe it.

The challenge for these companies reminds me of the business fable of “The Chicken and the Pig”.For those who are not familiar with the story, the point of the fable is commitment to a project or cause. When producing a dish made of bacon and eggs, the pig is completely committed.

When it comes to Go-to-Market, for many of these companies, there are too many chickens!

A Typical Approach to Win Loss Analysis

Many sales teams claim to have a handle on the reason why they win or lose an opportunity. After we assess their practice, we learn that their process to determine those reasons is almost always the same: A Salesforce generated win-loss report.